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Looking back on Maryland’s antebellum past, Trustee Scholarship recipient Veronica Hart ’05 (Sewanee, Tenn.) has stepped behind the dark bars of county prisons and penitentiaries in order to shed light on how race affected crime and punishment in the 1800s.
Hart, a double major in economics & business and Spanish, is working with Howard Bodenhorn, associate professor of economics & business, as part of Lafayette’s distinctive EXCEL Scholars program, in which students collaborate with faculty on research while earning a stipend. Many of the 180 students who participate each year go on to publish papers in scholarly journals and/or present their research at conferences.
Bodenhorn will present the results of his collaboration with Hart at a faculty seminar at Saint Lawrence University in September and their article will soon be published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., where Bodenhorn is a research associate.
Bodenhorn is author of two major works on banking in early America — a book published last year by Oxford University Press and a prior volume published by Cambridge University Press. His insightful research has been recognized by grants from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, awards from two economics journals, and appointment as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“Professor Bodenhorn has gone to the archives office in Maryland,” says Hart, “and piled up records from the 1800s on inmates in the state penitentiary, and Baltimore’s city and county prisons. Working with spreadsheets, I am typing in data on each inmate, including such items as race, occupation, crime, sentence, and whether they attended Sunday school or led a temperate life or were bound out as an apprentice to learn a trade. The focus of my work is to see if there is a discrepancy between sentence length in respect to the crime and in respect to race.”
With more than 1,000 records to examine, Hart says it is too early to draw bold conclusions, but their work does suggest “there is a discrepancy between the black and white incarceration rates. It’s too early to say yet, but the imprisoned rate for blacks was noticeably higher than for whites, even though the white population outnumbered the black population.”
Much of Hart’s time this summer has been spent in research and reading. “I’ve learned some serious research skills,” she says. “I’ve learned how to check on-line databases and to determine what material seems trustworthy. I’ve been combing through the academic literature, much of it contemporary, to get an understanding of social ideas and values affecting imprisonment.”
Hart says what excites her is “how the research with Professor Bodenhorn is helping me examine economic issues within a social and historical context. We’re taking theories I learned from textbooks and applying them to real-world issues.”
“Veronica has been an excellent EXCEL student,” says Bodenhorn, who is working on an article on crime, punishment, and race in antebellum Maryland, with Hart’s help, in anticipation someday of turning their research into a book on the social and economic status of blacks in early America. “She is hard-working and diligent. She’s the sort of student who keeps me busy. I assign her work on Monday, assuming it will take her until Friday, and she comes to me Wednesday looking for more to do! She is the sort of student who enlivens a project with her enthusiasm and her intellect.”
“The research we are doing this summer,” he says, “teaches someone like Veronica that the material we teach in the classroom matters and it comes at a high price of effort and diligence. Not only has she done a lot of research, she has had to organize and sift through data in order to find out what raw material is important to a researcher.”
“The EXCEL program offers me opportunities that few small colleges offer students,” says Hart, who is a member of Alpha Gamma Delta sorority, a dean’s list student, and recipient of the Eugene P. Chase Phi Beta Kappa Prize. Hart is a tutor with America Reads, America Counts as well as a volunteer peer tutor on campus. She also serves as treasurer of Lafayette Communications Union.
“The EXCEL program is a fantastic opportunity where you are paid to learn, and you get the chance to work with faculty on a one-on-one basis, taking a great deal of responsibility for serious research. I feel like I am taking away so much education this summer, education that will prepare me for the future.”
Hart is a 2001 graduate of St. Andrews High School.